Helping My Parents Trust My Decision
Written by Tchea Yu
Ever since I was eleven, when I first watched The Lake House (2006), I knew I wanted to be an architect when I grew up - just like Keanu Reeves was in the movie. I was good at art. I enjoyed reading about design. I highlighted and studied my Home & Decor magazines more diligently than my school textbooks, and that free IKEA catalogue we get each year? That was my most prized possession. I knew what I was passionate about and having to think about the future, planning my goals and career path was 100% fuss-free– while it lasted.
I guess reality strikes each one of us at different points in life. For me, it was when I was in polytechnic pursuing interior architecture (part of the original plan) where I started volunteering and doing community work (not part of the original plan). I remembered there was this one time when we delivered food packs to residents staying at the rental flats in Bukit Merah – an elderly man living alone in a close-to-empty flat with the only prominent furniture being his thin and tattered mattress on the floor; a family of 8 squeezed into a one-room flat struggling to get by their everyday needs. For the first time, the meanings of words like “poverty”, “social isolation”, “discrimination”, “inequality” and “mental health” transcended those of their dictionary definitions to ones that made my heart ache. It might sound dramatic, but I don’t know how else to describe what they mean to me - in them lay a sense of responsibility I felt to help them out of their struggles and pain. It only made sense if I do, and it felt like nothing else could fulfil me if I don’t. Not even being an architect anymore.
What My Parents Think I Should be Doing
My parents are really nice to hang out with and open-minded about many things. But somehow, when it comes to their children’s career choices, they automatically put on their “traditional-thinking parent” cap. This was how I made sense of it: my mom grew up in the farm and experienced what it was like to be poor before arriving at where she is today, where she and her siblings run their own business chain while my dad has been a businessman since young. To them, a good pay cheque and financial stability from a job were key to success in life. I recalled the times when I would share about the work I do at social enterprises I had interned at, only to have them mocking at how silly I was to indulge in the work my companies do.
“Aiyah, 这种赚不了钱的啦,有什么用” (aiyah, your company will not make money from this, what’s the use of it?)
No matter how hard I tried to explain our business model and company mission, they would just choose not to internalize it. But they let me do what I do, after all, I was still a student then and those were “just internships” anyway.
Things Got Real On My Last Day
Late last year, a few of my friends and I started working on an impact project together while I was working on a full-time job. On the last day of my job, my mom’s opinion on doing impact work full-time stood out loud and clear. She told me very sternly, “我不要你一没有工就去忙这个” (I do not want to see you working on this – referring to the impact project I was doing with my friends - once your job ends).
Great, now what? I want to do good and work in the impact sector, that I was sure. But it was also my utmost priority to make my parents happy and proud. I wanted to let them know that I can be financially independent and am more than capable of taking care of not just myself but the family as well. It almost felt to me then that the latter and the former could not go hand-in-hand. It felt like to achieve one, I would have to forsake the other. At that point, I knew I needed guidance to resolve these tensions within me to move forward into the next stage in life.
Where Progress was Within Sight
With the recommendation from a good friend of mine, I signed up for Bold At Work’s Design Your Life workshop. I was excited and had a good feeling about it. But to be honest, I did not want to hold my hopes too high for the workshop to be able to resolve all the tensions within me, simply because I knew that at the end of the day, it had to come from within. Over the two-day workshop, I made the most progress I did over the past months or maybe even years to pursue what mattered to me.
The exercises, conversations and games we played during the workshop helped me to validate that the things that matter to me, do indeed matter to me (a.k.a my family and doing impact work), and realise that other things I thought I valued too, were actually things I was very willing to forgo (a.k.a getting a high pay). This helped me to pinpoint the crux of my struggle between my conflicting goals was the lack of communication with my parents on how I feel about my career choice to work in the impact sector. At last, I came out of that self-pity zone that my parents were unsupportive of me and my dreams and convinced myself into taking active steps to make my life better for myself.
Turns out that it was not as complicated as I had thought all this while. The tension I had could be resolved with just some HTHT with my parents. To be honest, I still do not understand why something as straightforward as having a conversation with my parents about this felt completely out of the question back then. But what I do know is that the DYL workshop helped me to learn a lot more about myself. These discoveries were essential in helping me find a way through my struggles, derive what needs to be done and actually do it. After speaking with my parents, I was able to better understand what their concerns were and was able to help them gain trust in my decisions. While I know that deep down they are probably still not 100% convinced, I am thankful that they have chosen to let their guard down, and to put trust and faith in my decision. These alone were enough to give me the confidence I needed to pursue my dreams.
Feeling stuck in your next decision, be it for work or personal life? Join us in ‘Design Your Life’ workshop that will equip you with tools to design the life and career that you want!